atomic VS squint

I wanted ClojureScript, without transpilation, in the browser so badly I implemented much of it in plain JS. But JS still lacks first-class protocols (although there is a T39 proposal for them) so I have to implement protocols first. And I can tell you from having implemented much of Clojure myself in plain JS that it's protocols all the way down. 80% of my library are types and their protocols.

I've watched a lot of talks, but it was Rich Hickey's which most captivated me and, ultimately, inspired big change in how I coded. After discovering Clojure I was so desiring FP (i.e. ClojureScript) in the browser without a build step and hoard of dependencies that I wrote my own library.

I fell in love with Clojure and ported most of the tools to plain ol' JavaScript. I stole reactives and FRP from Elm. I write a functional core then wrap it with an imperative shell. It's been my mainstay for 10 years now.

What I did was looked past the languages at the ideas and saw they could be applied everywhere, including JavaScript. Take a look at my example programs (via prior link) and you can see Clojure applied to the JavaScript/browser realm.

I have found that the amount of code needed to support any page/app need not be massive. I have implemented modern board games with 250-300KB of js and the core lib I use on all my projects maxes out around 250KB, unminified. The lib itself is built on the premise of build avoidance.

I do JavaScript most of the time, but I was so inspired that I ported the Clojure mindset into the web development world so I could use it even in the absence of Clojure. I know there's ClojureScript, but I wanted the goodness without transpilation.

So I don't even do Clojure per se. I do Clojure in JavaScript without ClojureScript.

I use functional core, imperative shell. It would have you write a core which is a pure simulation. Write everything in the core using immutable data and pure functions. I elaborate on that here, along with examples.

Have you considered https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint ?

Personally I couldn't let go of Clojure's other advantages but at least using the syntax would let you step off the syntax churn bus

Interesting, in the CLJS space we recently got two new libraries in this space:

https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint Which is a thin layer on top of JS

https://github.com/squint-cljs/cherry Which is closer to CLJS semantics and data structures but compiles to .mjs files without any advanced optimizations etc.

I've also experimented a bit with Solid. Here's a SolidJS demo in squint: https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint/blob/main/examples/solidjs/src/App.cljs It runs over here: https://squint-cljs.github.io/demos/squint/solidjs/ (The JS output is smaller than the favicon in that project!)

Maybe Squint https://github.com/squint-cljs/squint or Cherry might fit the bill. https://github.com/squint-cljs/cherry

Should you need a minimal sprinkle of JS, you can still generate this server side using squint (which works as a JVM library) as well, while shipping a pretty small JS library to your client.

Sounds like there's some overlap with squint there!